Young Writers Society

It had many names.

The Silent Sea. The Dark Runs. Koimeterion. The Heart of Shadows. Licburg. The Devil’s Cradle. Otherworld. Christians sometimes called it Hell. In the days before the Kâlu faith was tamed, its adherents called it the Fortress of Gods.

Vivienne knew it by its proper name. Glîserentu. The Bone Place. The knowledge had been passed down among select families, kept alive because someone had to. The things that lived in the Bone Place liked human attention. Denied it, they found ways to seek it out more directly, left their realm behind and emerged into this one; the last time it happened, humanity was nearly wiped out. The families who remembered tended to the Bone Place’s need for attention to prevent another slaughter by keeping the old history-songs alive and murmuring ceremonial prayers on Kâlu holidays.

Few were reckless enough to try to find a way to go in.

The Bone Place looked different than Vivienne had expected. She had stepped through the doorway onto a long, black beach littered with bleached bones and tufts of long, rust-colored grass. But for the bones and the color scheme, it could be a normal beach; its most offensive feature was the rank smell of brine and rotting seaweed. A cold breeze rolled off the sea, which was green and opaque and from this distance appeared to be a great deal more viscous than water.

She picked her way down the beach. Her great-grandmother, Lila Chaudhri, had entered the Bone Place herself when she was not much older than Vivienne’s sixteen. Lila had been careful, wary of being caught and executed for tangling with demons; she coded her instructions into her journals alongside ponderings about injustice and service and the nature of Akal. Breaking the code took Vivienne almost six months of research and no small amount of guesswork.

But broken it she had, in the end. And here she stood, following in Lila’s footsteps. Vivienne wondered idly if her great-grandmother’s bones lay somewhere on this beach.

Vivienne stepped over a human skull, and something squeaked behind her. She stiffened but didn’t look. Passengers were one of the only inhabitants of the Bone Place that made sounds at all, and they were harmless until someone made eye contact. Vivienne smiled grimly. This one could follow her all it liked; she knew better than to turn around.

She had nearly reached the shoreline now. The Passenger stalking her began to sing in an unpleasant, high-pitched whine. It made her want to claw at her own ears and carried a compulsive edge which stuck in her thoughts like a bur and demanded she look for the source of the sound; she caught the impulse and siphoned it into a less noticeable channel of her mind where it could wear itself out and die in peace.

At the very edge of the sand, sticky green fluid oozed over shattered fragments of bone and tangled clumps of seaweed. The smell of it curdled in her nostrils. Vivienne folded her arms and closed her eyes, wondering—not for the first time—if she truly intended to go through with this. If she could.

If she could afford not to.

Vivienne puffed out a nervous breath and opened her eyes again. The sea glooped at her. She had the distinct impression of eyes watching from within its murky depths. From this part, at least, she knew what to expect. The Kâlu religion survived the loss of direct contact with its gods, after a fashion. Its associated magics were quieter now. Safer. The payment of blood in exchange for bone was a mere symbolic gesture now, and augurs no longer welcomed Passengers into their heads.

But the old texts remained, and Lila Chaudhri had made it her life’s work to translate them in secret. She’d filled whole journals with the advice of ancient augurs, and Vivienne had read enough of them to know what she must do now. Unpleasant though it was certain to be.

She scraped her nails over her left palm, peeling up fresh scabs. The cuts there began to bleed once more, and Vivienne knelt before the sea and held out out her hand in offering. The cuts stung bitterly; there were four of them. She’d carved them with a box cutter to call the doorway to the Bone Place into existence.

The first three ran along the major lines of her palm: heart and head and life. The fourth ran down the length of her mercury line, to signal her motives for coming here. Health. She’d had a hell of a time finding it.

The inhabitants of the Bone Place set great store by palmistry, apparently.

Four drops of blood oozed from her palm. They hit the surface of the sea one after another and stayed there, perfectly round, instead of dispersing like they would in normal water. Something hissed in beneath the liquid. Vivienne held her breath.

A dark, rubbery tentacle lashed up out of the sea and wrapped around her wrist. The flesh of it felt slippery and cold against her skin; it squeezed tighter, and she felt the bite of barbed suction cups—like ground glass chewing into her flesh. She imagined ice filling her muscles to keep from yanking away. That would accomplish nothing but flaying the skin from her wrist. Streaks of red appeared down the length of the tentacle, and she repressed another shudder.

The damn thing had to taste her before any sort of deal could be made. The creatures of the Bone Place could read skill and weakness and desire in blood. In ancient times it was how they selected their augurs.

She breathed. Her whole arm shook—she could feel her skin sheering apart under the suction cups and fierce, electric pain radiated all the way up to her shoulder. The tentacle pulsed once more—Vivienne gritted her teeth—and then it withdrew. The sea swallowed it up with a soft plop, and Vivienne drew her arm in close to her torso. A series of round wounds encircled her wrist; the tentacle’s suction cups had eaten so deep she could see vermillion hints of muscle beneath darker layers of skin. Each one burned like acid.

The surface of the sea began to boil. A bubble the size of her fist burst, and slimy droplets of the liquid splattered across her cheek.

Vivienne tucked her chin close to her chest and half-closed her eyes; the world seemed hazy with pain. She gathered up as much of it as she could and folded it into something more manageable, then thrust it into the furthest corner of her mind. It would fade or come back in an hour or two hurting more ferociously than ever; either way, she could think rationally for the moment. The fire building in her arm cooled to embers.

A moment later, the whole beach shuddered, and a—thing—erupted out of the sea. It was massive and looked like it had been built of the same liquid that filled the sea: oily and opaque, black-green in color and in a constant state of slow transformation. There were too many limbs and too many mouths, the latter bristling with teeth and gleaming ropes of saliva. To her relief, it didn’t appear to have tentacles at the moment. She stomped on the instinct to cower and lifted her chin instead.

LIVING ONE, it said.

The voice made no sound; instead it arrived directly in her mind with a cacophony like a whole murder of crows screaming at once. It felt like a spike driving straight into her brain. Vivienne winced. Her heart hammered in her chest, whether from fear or excitement she didn’t know. Both, maybe.

“You know what I want,” she whispered.

I WISH TO HEAR IT, the thing said. It grew more arms as she watched, then collapsed inwards to become a single, enormous mouth.

She took a deep breath. Thinking about this was one thing—admitting it out loud to something most would call a demon quite another. “Addiction runs in my family,” she said. “To—well—”

Drinking. Alcohol. She couldn’t even give voice to the words without cravings wringing her head out like a sponge. Mother’s Armadale. Larry’s Springbank. Her father’s Keystone Light and his wife’s Clos du Bois Chardonnay, on the weekends she spent with them.

Sneaking drinks was easier at home; during the semester she had to rely on the kindness of other students whose parents lived closer to her boarding school. Her GPA slipped to an unacceptable 3.8 over the fall semester because she spent so much time wrestling with cravings; the spring semester so far looked set to follow the downward trend. Vivienne clenched her fists and folded her arms around her ribs. Fucking genetic predispositions. Fucking idiotic decision to cure boredom by raiding the freezer.

She could loathe it all she wanted; the overwhelming desire still tugged on fishhooks buried in her skin.

I CANNOT ALTER THAT, the thing said.

“I know,” Vivienne said, although she felt a pang of disappointment nonetheless. “But I think I could—sublimate it, or at least manage it, with the kind of power you offer.” She drew her arms tighter around herself, flinching when the fabric of her sweater scraped the wounds on her wrist. “I know the costs. I’m prepared to pay.”

AMORTAL LIFE, it said. TO FORFEIT YOUR MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY.

“I know,” Vivienne said. The Kâlu texts she’d read last Christmas devoted lengthy paragraphs to debating just what amortality meant. The general consensus was loss of soul; those who wore the Bone Place’s magic lived until they didn’t. Those who didn’t return from the Bone Place with minds broken by pain came back—empty, disconnected. Shells of humanity going through the motions and vulnerable to corruption by parasitic magic that never quite lost its sentience.

The prospect might frighten her more if Vivienne had ever seen evidence that she owned a soul in the first place. Other people did, she had no doubt; they were… fully realized and warm, indefinably so and in a way Vivienne had never, despite her best attempts, managed to imitate.

Further emptiness would be no great loss.

The thing stirred, arms twisting into tentacles that braided together to become necks which ended in pincers and feathered antennae. Inky feathers broke out along its crooked back. AND YOU ARE WILLING?

“I am,” Vivienne said.

It morphed again, honing itself to a long, thin point, slightly curved. The tip gleamed. From the other end dangled a long rope of dark green, although it grew thinner and thinner as Vivienne watched.

Needle. Thread.

She took a deep breath and braced herself. The needle would sew its thread of power into her sternum. It would take minutes; even that was enough to drive most people who attempted this mad. It remained to be seen whether she would come out the other end with her mind intact.

The needle flashed, and her mind lit up like a firework. White-hot light scoured her vision clean. Molten lead drilled into her chest and filled her from the inside, a rushing tide of boiling metal. The needle dipped and pulled, and raw magic clawed into the tunnels left behind, and the burning sea rose up to swallow her. Fire and acid and electricity raced to devour each individual nerve. Exquisite, incandescent agony balanced on the point of a needle as long as her arm.

Vivienne screamed, and the conflagration banked higher in return.

It ended like a bucket of water tossed onto a match. The Bone Place collapsed around her; she opened her eyes and found herself crumpled on the dusty floor of her bedroom. Her chest throbbed; when she tugged down the neck of her sweater to examine it, she revealed a scar of livid green surrounded by hot, inflamed skin. It should fade as it healed to dark green, only a few shades darker than her skin and thus invisible from a distance.

Her arm and palm were healed with nothing but quarter-sized pockmarks to show where the tentacles had scoured away her flesh, which matched the Kâlu texts her great-grandmother had translated. Those driven into the Bone Place for reasons of health often returned with sporadic regenerative abilities; the magic kept them alive, sometimes.

Other times it ate them from within.

Excitement tingled in her belly, rather than the fear she would have expected from anyone else. And while the desire for a drink still lurked in her mind, it paled in comparison to the snarl of magic sitting in her chest, a distant threat for the first time since that damnable first sip last summer. And she felt no more of a shell than she had before she entered the Bone Place. The magic twanged in her chest, but she ignored it and it quieted after a moment’s unrest.

A challenge. That was what Vivienne really needed. School—even Groton, prestigious as it was—couldn’t do that for her. She thought it no coincidence that her headlong plunge into alcoholism began on a night of severe boredom and inadequate supervision, nor that her self-imposed quest to retrace her great-grandmother’s footsteps into the Bone Place corresponded with—well, not a decrease in consumption so much as a new ability to stretch out each glass for longer, so at least she didn’t get quite as drunk.

And now corruptive, parasitic magic pulsed inside her chest. Already, only a few minutes after leaving the Bone Place, she could feel the magic trying to slip a thick shroud over the parts of her mind that felt instead of thought. She shoved it back, and it snapped at her like a ravenous dog denied its meal.

If she let it take root, it could warp her beyond all recognition.

She wanted to laugh, but she restrained herself. It was almost two in the morning and Mother, although delighted to have Vivienne home for the spring break, would no doubt be displeased if she woke up and discovered what Vivienne had been doing for the past few hours.

If this couldn’t challenge her, then nothing could.